One of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists has recently published a book which, as a central theme, questions the importance of natural selection in evolution.
Dr Michael Lynch is a distinguished Professor at Indiana University and one of the most influential figures in evolutionary genetics research. His CV lists 157 peer-reviewed scientific articles (to place this in context, it is over twice that of Richard Dawkins). In 2005, he wrote in a letter to Nature that "evolution is as much a fact as respiration and digestion” and dismissed intelligent design as “intellectual laziness".
Dr Lynch’s new book The Origins of Genome Architecture (Sinaeur, 2007) is a landmark professional text that seeks to apply evolutionary theory and population genetics to the study of whole genomes. Throughout the book, Lynch argues that the effectiveness of natural selection has been over-rated by many of his fellow evolutionists. For example, on page 367 of his book, Dr Lynch suggests that:
For the vast majority of scientists, evolution is nothing more than natural selection. This view reduces the study of evolution to the simple documentation of differences between species, proclamation of a belief in Darwin, and concoction of a superficially reasonable tale of adaptive divergence.
Lynch has several reasons for questioning the role of natural selection. In particular, the effectiveness of selection is very dependent on the size of the population it is acting upon: it is more effective in large populations than small ones. Smaller, simpler organisms (such as bacteria) tend to have much larger population sizes than larger, more complex organisms (such as mammals). So natural selection should be much less effective in mammals than in bacteria.
Instead of natural selection, Lynch suggests that much complexity has evolved passively. Due to the way in which organisms reproduce and mutations occur, complexity could gradually accumulate in biological lineages. Much of the book is devoted to explaining various non-adaptive mechanisms by which features of genomes could evolve.
That is not to say that natural selection is unimportant: Lynch still believes that it plays a major role in evolution. He considers that he is in the line of Darwin when he argues that natural selection should not be over-emphasised. He is concerned that the public may have been misled on this point:
Dawkins’s effort to spread the gospel of the awesome power of natural selection has been quite successful, but it has come at the expense of reference to any other mechanisms, and because more people have read Dawkins than Darwin, his words have in some ways been profoundly misleading (page 369).
He is equally critical of individuals involved in the education of children:
Numerous popularizers of evolution, some with careers focused on defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, are entirely satisfied that a blind adherence to the Darwinian concept of natural selection is a license for such activities (page 366).
He even suggests (on page 368) that:
the uncritical acceptance of natural selection as an explanatory force for all aspects of biodiversity (without any direct evidence) is not much different than invoking an intelligent designer (without any direct evidence).
The Origins of Genome Architecture received a glowing review in the leading science journal Nature on 14 February 2007. “This book is a must-read for every genome researcher,” wrote evolutionist Axel Meyer. He welcomed the controversial aspects of the book: “Not every evolutionary biologist, genome researcher or ‘evo-devo-ist’ will agree with Lynch's strong opinions that largely non-adaptive forces shaped genomes, but it is a debate worth having,” he wrote.